I found this article very informative, but I had a couple of follow-up questions.

1. For load balancing CRM servers, you mention using NLB. Is there something unique about the CRM architecture that would prevent other load balancers from working (e.g. F5, Zeus)?

2. Is there a way to scale up the SQL servers if the bottleneck is in the database? (e.g. partitioning data across multiple servers, CRM database and metadata on different servers) I noticed that the report server could be somewhere else.